Painting in the Machine (Gallery 151)

Anton Perich is a pioneer of the new form of "digital" art, decades before this concept even existed. In the 1970's Perich designed and built a revolutionary painting apparatus, predating the inkjet printer, making images that closely resemble the distorted bygone analog screen.

Press Release

Gallery 151 is proud to present “Painting in the Machine”, a solo exhibition by Anton Perich – displaying twelve large new canvases from this decade. In the recent paintings by Perich, additional element has convened through electricity and gravity – a drip.

Since the late 1970’s, the “machine paintings” are trademarked by their horizontal mechanized strokes, resembling a distorted analog screen. Perich sought out the high resolution effect in his work, as some sort of an enigmatic desire.

This is not the first time a drip reinvented the painting. The familiar examples of drip pioneers Norman Bluhm and Jackson Pollock come to mind. Yet, in this modernized example, the drip is the excess data dissolving and dripping off the canvas. Vanishing into the abyss. Perich candidly explores this age-of-information parable by leaving the canvas at a furious pace. The so-called flat screen promises of millions of colors, down the drain, so to speak. Meanwhile, the artist restrains his machine to produce only twelve colors. Less [information] is more.

Anton Perich’s electro-charged palette is prevalent in Eurydice and Emanation, similarly to the “drip paintings” by Ronnie Landfield and Dan Christensen – but more controlled. The less-automatic drips take elegant shapes (Arabic script or botanical tassels) as they dance through the static lines and then gently slide off, while some remain tucked in the crevices of acrylic paint’s texture. Viewer’s attention is held with a motionless traction in the musing figurative pieces such as Andrea, White and Dance Movement I, and the digital strokes appear to fade in & out -- as though recollecting a vision. The artist-curated titles of the work present an unceasing quest for spirituality, mythology, fetishism, sensuality, among other supreme entities that eternally withstand the digital impact.